GovernmentAttic.org has got to be one of the most unusual and potentially most beneficial sites on the Internet concerning the federal government.
Here’s how the site organizers describe it:
“GovernmentAttic.org provides electronic copies of hundreds of interesting Federal Government documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Fascinating historical documents, reports on items in the news, oddities and fun stuff and government bloopers, they’re all here. Think of browsing this site as rummaging through the Government’s Attic — hence our name.”
And true to their description, it doesn’t much rummaging about on the site to see that there really is an incredible amount of interesting stuff here. In just a few minutes, I found IG reports on cases closed at various departments and agencies, complaints to the FCC about such popular TV shows as “Desperate Housewives” and “Mad Men,” a District of Columbia government training manual for parking enforcement officers (writing parking tickets is what D.C. government does best), and two State Department documents from the 1970s concerning Chinese leaders. And believe me, that only scratches the surface.
One caveat: The site tends to focus primarily on materials and documents gathered from FOIAs submitted to defense and intelligence agencies, so there is much more material from those fields than from others. But the principle here – posting documents obtained through the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) for public use – is an important one and the scope of the site will hopefully be expanded to encompass the entire federal government.
And why not have similar sites for all state and local governments, too? There is no limit to the storage capacity of the Internet, and everybody can get to it quite easily. This could be a priceless resource for citizens, voters, historians, government officials and who knows who else.
